Design Inquiry: Good idea or bad?

[Alexander Morou]

I'm just curious.

Lately I've been just swamped with work, and as a result don't have a lot of time to work on actual programming; however, that is about to change, with a change of jobs. So, I wanted to get some insight towards some ideas I've had:

1. Map Editor
a. Inherited Maps - I plan on making a program for making games, and one thing I've always wondered about is instances in games where a town is destroyed or altered in some major fashion. Would it be useful to be able to create a map that derives or inherits another map's base data and basic elements? Ignoring the design aspect of it, if you had this 'copy' that only stored the differences between the two, you could have your copy from early on, make the changes that need made, and as your game's design progresses, if you make changes to the original, the copy follows suit, except where the changes are made.

b. Map Stamps - Similar to the inherited maps concept, except a bit smaller. In some games, it's useful to be able to take a basic structure and allow the player to 'place' it around the town. This could be accomplished by prefabricated constructs (or, small maps) that you could specify in code where and when to place them, based upon user decisions. When the map is loaded, the system would automatically 'stamp' the current map with your prefabs, making them show up where desired. The specific code that would specify when and where, might require user code, but it's an interesting idea since it removes the need to manually iterate the map data structure in code, and alter the main map's data.

I'll post more ideas as they come. Please give your insight towards these, and if you have any ideas of your own, don't hesitate to post them, since I'm interested in seeing what people find most useful.

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

I've seen map stamps before. I did a little bit of mapping for a game that had a custom editor that had that. I think it's a cool idea, but in my opinion RMXP's ability to let you just select multiple tiles at a time from the tileset is better. Now, if you can do both that is pretty cool. Shouldn't be too hard to pull that off.

As for inherited maps, I would say don't bother. It isn't very often that you're going to need maps that would inherit properties from other maps and it's probably not worth the effort on your end.

EDIT: Oh, an idea you may want to consider is regions. What you could do is make maps the children of regions, and regions could set map- and game-wide properties over a span of maps. You could have some things directly related to mapping, like maybe make it so the engine will automatically spawn specific NPCs in every map in a region (Like birds for forests, seagulls in islands). You could also have things not directly related to mapping, like arbitrary variables. That way, someone could easily make, say, a survival type of script where you have to monitor your body temperature and hydration levels, so someone might use the arbitrary variables for air temperature, humidity etc.